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Edited by: Stoli on 20/10/2003 19:28:35

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Edited by: Danton Marcellus on 20/10/2003 18:43:36
Wrong! Read up on de Beers and diamonds, OPEC and oil, medicine and the third world.

Market economy in general is withholding goods in order to get the profit you want, not selling for a reasonable price, that would be danger close to communism, now we can't have that can we?!

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Dante, you've been reading too many globalization conspiracy pamphlets lately! A market economy is the OTHER way around - producing goods or supplying services to meet the demands of others. In a market economy, sitting on your product/service means that someone else will get out there and supply the product/service, and you will be left with a whole lot of useless stock.

Market economics even applies to diamonds and oil. Diamonds - despite what my girlfriend seems to think - are not a necessity. If the prices are too high, no one will buy them, so the market (ie, demand) controls the price. As for oil, OPEC can't get the prices it WANTS (which would be a few hundred dollars a barrel), because it knows two things:

1) other producers will get into the game once the price gets high enough to justify doing things like drilling in the North Sea or the Siberian tundra (which is expensive), increasing the demand outside of OPEC, and forcing the price down;

2) if it stays too high for too long, people will develop alternatives that, for the moment, are too expensive to develop at the current price of oil. This risks having their entire stock being rendered relatively worthless.

As far as this game is concerned, if someone were successfully selling items that cost 230 ISK each at a rate of 70,000 ISK each, and there was a DEMAND for that item at that rate, then the market should very shortly be FLOODED with that item, with each market entrant selling at a rate below the one before him, as long as there was still a profit.

In other words, a player should be able to make a killing by buying up these consumer electronics elsewhere, and bringing them back to the region where someone is trying to sell for 70,000 ISK each. You come back and sell for 5,000 ISK each...either the hoarder has to buy up your stock to keep control of the market, or they have to reduce their entire stock to below 5,000 ISK to compete. Rinse and repeat - you will either make a quick fortune, or very quickly force the price down to a reasonable level.

And THAT, my dear Danton, is how the MARKET works.

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